As part of the long-ongoing series where I look at the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series put forward by site readers, I’m once again moving into unfamiliar territory – at least by series – with the Dorothy St. James title, The Broken Spine. I specify unfamiliar with the series because I have read books by Dorothy St. James before, but nothing in this, the Beloved Bookroom Mystery Series, which only started last year in 2021. That definitely puts this in the running as one of the most recent series that I’ve read for this series.

As is likely obvious from the title of both series and book, this is one of the more popular topics in Cozy fiction – books about books – very “meta”. Trudell Becket (sometimes “Tru” to her friends), the librarian of a library in the town of Cypress, South Carolina, is campaigning against the conversion of the library to a “bookless” library, one that focuses primarily on the lending of electronic books. When the books are finally all scheduled to be removed and dumped in a landfill, Trudell and a group of friends break into the library at night, determined to save at least some of the books from destruction by housing them in a now-abandoned bomb shelter built in World War II under the library.

Unfortunately, while moving books down into the basement, Trudell and her friends are surprised by the sound of a crash, which Trudell quickly determines came from a shelf of DVDs falling onto the town manager – the very person who had led the campaign to move the library to a bookless format. Naturally, Trudell is a leading candidate for the murder – not only was she vocally opposed to the transition, she was also in the library at the time of the death. Also naturally, she also has a somewhat complicated relationship with one of the local detectives, a former high school classmate of hers, though in this case he is the one who has recently returned to the town.

There’s definitely an obvious irony in the method of how I read this particular book – on my Kindle, taking advantage of the variable type size. My eyes aren’t what they once were, and while I was initially skeptical of moving to an electronic format, the option of having several hundred books in a single package lighter than a paperback and lit for easy bedroom reading has definitely made the transition smoother. That said, I personally don’t think that the electronic format should fully replace the printed word, and certainly still appreciate the charm of actual paper books – there’s a certain physicality to them that isn’t possible for Kindles, and I still find browsing through pages for a detail I want to recall easier than working backwards through a Kindle. So I can see both sides of the paper vs. electronic argument.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Being a Cozy about books and book lovers, it certainly covers a lot of old ground, but it also discusses newer issues like electronic books – though admittedly in an often obviously biased way.

If you’re interested in seeing other most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, please visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

This month I am highlighting another “blast from the past” (as the oldies radio stations used to say) in the continuance of my series of posts about the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series.  Elizabeth Peters‘ Amelia Peabody series began way back in 1975 with Crocodile on the Sandbank and continued until 2017 with the 20th book in the series co-written by Joan Hess, no less. 

Crocodile on the Sandbank is, at its heart, an adventure (with some romance thrown in!) story. Set in Victorian times in the 19th century, the story is narrated in the first person by Amelia Peabody, a (mostly) enlightened no-nonsense woman who unexpectedly receives an inheritance that allows her a certain amount of freedom. She resolves to use some of the money to travel to Europe and ultimately Egypt. 

Along the way, she encounters a young disinherited heiress who has fainted in the ruins of the Roman Forum. Amelia swoops in to save the day. Ultimately, Amelia hires the young woman, Evelyn Barton-Forbes to be her traveling companion, and the adventures and mysterious occurrences begin. 

The pair travel to Egypt. Amelia has a special interest in Egyptology (as had her father), and it turns out she also has a gift for archeology.  Of course, in the 19th century, archeology as a true science was pretty new, and women were discouraged from pursuing any vocation outside of the home. So, even though there are many obstacles in her way, Amelia more or less falls into the field of Egyptology which becomes one of the passions of her life.

Crocodile on the Sandbank is written in what I would call a classic style. The first-person narrative unfolds at a quite leisurely pace. The mystery takes quite a few pages to begin to unfold. If you are someone who wants a murder to happen within the first few pages of a cozy mystery, you must look elsewhere! But, if you are looking for something a bit different — more like a mystery and adventure movie from the 1930s or 40s, this story, I think, will fulfill your wishes.

Elizabeth Peters (aka Barbara Michaels and Barbara Mertz) writes a compelling story set in the world of 19th century Egyptology. She had a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, so it is not surprising that the details about archeology and Egyptian history seem (to my untrained eye at least) invariably accurate. The narrative is very well written, and though the pace seems leisurely, I guess that is what I was in the mood for because I found it difficult to put the book down as I followed Amelia and Evelyn’s adventures.

A few words of warning should be given, however. I said earlier that Amelia Peabody is “mostly” enlightened for a reason. Although for a Victorian British woman, Amelia is extremely enlightened from a feminist point of view, she still is a woman of her times from the point of view of paternalistic colonialism. I think her point of view is portrayed correctly from the standpoint of a British woman who is writing in the 19th century. But our modern sensibilities toward colonialism are not well represented.

If you’re interested in seeing other most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, please visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

The last few months, I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the modern Cozy format when doing my reading for my long running series of posts on the most popular and recommended Cozy series. However, that definitely won’t be the case this week, as the mystery I’ve decided to showcase is 2015’s Tastes Like Murder, the first in Catherine Bruns‘s Cookies & Chance Mystery Series.

As stated above, this is definitely a Cozy in the modern mold. Sally Muccio has recently finished up an emotionally-draining divorce from her now ex-husband, who she discovered was cheating on her with another woman. To try to bounce back from the relationship gone bad, she’s set up a cookie shop in her old hometown of Colwestern, New York, a small town in western New York state. This may not have been the greatest idea in retrospect, as Amanda, the woman who intruded in Sally’s marriage, is a relatively important person in the city.

Naturally (at least for the world of Cozies…), it isn’t long before Amanda turns up dead, having come into Sally’s cookie shop to taunt her, dropping dead on the doorstep of an apparent poisoning, which turns out to be bee venom that she was seriously allergic to. Though the police don’t immediately jump to accusing Sally or her shop of poisoning Amanda, the tight-knit nature of small town living where everyone knows everyone else’s business makes it clear that the death is definitely going to cause problems for the shop’s growth, leading Sally to begin investigating on her own.

As is standard in modern Cozies, there is a strong romance subplot, in this case involving the choice between former high-school flame Mike and hunky cop Brian. Many other standard Cozy mainstay characters are present, including the reliable, tough, and supportive best friend/employee, Josie, as well as a wacky family, this time in a decidedly Italian-American mold.

If you’re looking to read a conventional Cozy with a lot of familiar trappings that have become mainstays of the sub-genre in the last few decades, Tastes Like Murder is a solid choice to pick up.

If you’re interested in seeing more highlights of some of the most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.

PS: For those interested in that sort of thing, there are some recipes included at the end of the book, of both the Italian traditional foods and bakery desserts varieties.

At long last, I decided to read the first Henry Gamadge book by Elizabeth Daly, Unexpected Night.  I read a long time ago that Elizabeth Daly was Agatha Christie’s favorite American mystery author, and ever since then I have been meaning to read her books, but with one thing and another, somehow I had never gotten around to doing it until now. Boy was I wrong to wait! Anyway, Unexpected Night is the next book in my series of posts discussing some of the most popular and recommended Cozy series.

Elizabeth Daly published the sixteen books in the Henry Gamadge series way back between 1940 and 1951. I have to admit one of the most attractive things about Unexpected Night is the setting that seems to be from a whole other age — and of course, it was. Set in a resort hotel in Maine, and populated by a young heir, his sister, mother, cousin, aunt, and uncle, (among other characters), the air about the characters and the setting is almost British just as you see in old British movies. Of course, old American movies also show this old-time gentility with “dressing for dinner” and other customs that are now long gone. With their formal dress and formal way of speaking, the whole ambiance is very different from the modern Cozy, and yet at its heart, Unexpected Night is, in a lot of ways, a model Cozy.

Set in 1939 Maine, the story begins with the arrival of sickly heir Amberly Cowden and his family at his Aunt and Uncle’s cottage on the outskirts of Ford’s Beach, a small summer resort. Amberly is set to inherit a large amount of money (a million dollars or so) upon his 21st birthday which is only an hour or so away. If he doesn’t survive until he is 21, distant French relatives will get the money. Luckily for his immediate family, Amberly survives long enough, and he and his family check into the local resort hotel just around midnight. Soon, though, there is a murder, and Henry Gamadge, a rare book authority (and amateur detective, as it turns out) helps the police unravel the mystery.

As with Agatha Christie’s books, the plot in Unexpected Night is intricate. I’m tempted to say “convoluted”, but I think that word holds too negative a connotation. There are quite a few characters in the story, and it is very interesting to see how Elizabeth Daly weaves the various plot elements (including several murders) together to create a mystery that is difficult to solve but which has enough clues sprinkled about that I was constantly thinking that I almost had figured it out only to learn that there was one more twist that didn’t quite fit my theory.

Reading this book was just old-fashioned fun! It required some thinking to keep the characters and the plot straight, but putting in the effort was really rewarding. If you are in the mood for something different — an old-fashioned mystery book set in a much different era, I wholeheartedly recommend Elizabeth Daly’s Unexpected Night.

If you’re interested in seeing other most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors/series, please visit the Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page on my site.